my mintinstall used to work perfectly (julia 10) but lately as soon as I type the first letter in the search field the whole works completely freeze. No matter how long I wait, no response. I finally have to "force quit" to get out of it. The program is completely unresponsive. But yet I can scroll thru the catagories, even install programs as long as I do not type anything at all. Very irritating because I like the prog (simple to use compared to synaptic) and searching sure is quicker. I've reinstalled the prog a few times with no change. Has someone had this problem before or now. Help me, please.

I have had this problem since I first installed mint (lxde mint 9 lts) on my netbook. I type one letter and the software manager freezes, and on trying to close, I have to force quit.

Seeing this thread made me think that I ought to file a bug report as richeyrich said, but I thought I would try the software manager again to make sure I had my facts right. I have just done this, and after typing one letter in the search box, it froze as usual. I thought I better check my preferences (press edit - I had never thought to do so before !) and found none of the check boxes were checked. I checked the summary option, and now it works although it is quite slow. One last thing: I found I had to reboot for the change to take affect

I tried the suggestion of prefs-checking and re-booting, but no change, still freezes at 1st typed letter in search pane. I've tried complete removal then re-installation, also no change. Very few of us have this problem, no one can re-create it, so I'll wait for suggestions or an answer. Everything else with my system is fine, and this problem didn't exist at 1st, it just popped up and bit me one day and won't let go.
martian46.......waiting for some kind assistance, please.

I don't know whether this issue is still active but yesterday I had the identical problems with LMDE - very slow after taking one input character, hanging after inputting password. When I ran from terminal I got the following messages

I investigated the [libwine] packages listed at the end and ran Package Manager which said I had broken packages ( I tried to install wine using 'dkpg' as per http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 28#p447129 and had a number of errors). I 'mended' these ('wine doesnt work but that's another issue!) automatically with Package Manager.
When I reran 'Software Manager' (from menu) it seems to work normally. It looked as if those 'broken packages' had broken mintinstall.
Don't whether this helps.
Iain

On my mint 12 installation, it doesn't crash after typing the first letter, but it does take a very long time to search for packages starting with that letter, so if I type 'g', because there are so many gnome packages, it will seem to have frozen for quite a few minutes. My machine is a Q6600 with 2G RAM.

I am having this same problem on Maya with the cinnamon desktop. Mintinstall freezes after I type the first letter in the search box. I then have to force it to quit. Any suggestions? I saw a post related to this that said it had been solved, but what is the fix?